The ‘Ted 2’ Red Band Trailer Is Exactly What You’d Expect

The first Ted made something in the neighborhood of a bajillion dollars, so a Ted 2 was inevitable and they don’t seem to be messing with the formula all that much. The new red band trailer (which is NSFW in all kinds of ways) showcases everything that worked in the first one ... as well as everything that didn’t work. In short, you and you alone know if Ted 2 is going to work for you.

Although Ted 2 does have a plot – something about how Seth MacFarlane’s living teddy bear has to prove he’s a person in a court of law so he can have children – the bulk of the trailer consists of Ted and Mark Wahlberg (playing Mark Wahlberg Persona Number Two) hanging out, getting stoned and swapping pop culture references. They also try to extract a sperm sample from Tom Brady because that’s a thing that everyone involved thought would be a good idea. But most of the trailer is riffing. Lots and lots of riffing.

Anyway, some of that riffing is legitimately funny, some of it painfully unfunny, and some of it genuinely troubling (including a regrettable transgender joke). In other words, it’s a MacFarlane production. It’s going to throw a thousand things at the wall and a few of them will stick. In any case, it probably won’t be as bad as A Million Ways to Die in the West, but that’s not a very high bar to stumble over.